Shipping great products is about the details that almost nobody will notice

A good promo process needs to notice the invisible

Apple did it for decades

It depends heavily on your manager and skip. My boss values operations and getting things done (including both doing things right from the beginning, and fixing things when we have to cut corners to launch quickly due to exogenous pressure), and that means people get promoted for being good engineers. Of course this falls apart for higher levels where it is entirely politics, but that is beyond my boss' influence.

I don't think it's the promo process itself. If the bug was something that actually affects Google's bottom line, I guarantee that Google would find a way such that the engineer would be incentivized to fix it.

Sweep it under the rug is not limited to any paticular industry.

What do you mean? Youtube is unquestionably one of the most successful projects ever launched? Seems like the process works astoundingly well.